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Perhaps this would be a good time to advocate link shorteners that use the standard HTTP redirect mechanism (bit.ly is one of them), so they can be HEAD'ed, and not some additional layer of obfuscation either via meta-redirect or (even worse) bury the target in some minified and obfuscated JS.

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I have an IRCbot that is supposed to resolve URLs and find out if they ever end up on YouTube, and then post the video title, length and viewcount.

It was an extreme hassle to implement all of this, I am partially parsing JS and the DOM just to get all those redirect services to work. It’s a huge hacky mess, but the only fast working solution.

And, for the fifth time today, I can sincerely say “Fuck you, Google!”

They don't want that because they don't want them to be automatically resolved so they can do metrics which is like 99% of the reason they are used in electronic form.

If they are temporary redirects, so not cached, they can do metrics from the server logs perfectly well.

Not if the intermediary, say, Twitter, de-shortens the link once, and then sends all the real traffic to the cached destination URLS. Not that they do that at the moment.

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